JOHN RANSOM PHILLIPS RANSOMING MATHEW BRADY
Wendy Doniger Wendy Doniger is a noted author of nearly 30 books, including The Hindus: An Alternative History...
Zahi Hawass Zahi Hawass is the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Director of Excavations...
Alan Trachtenberg Alan Trachtenberg is the Neil Gray, Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University, is the author of Reading...

Ransoming Mathew Brady:

John Ransom Phillips with Alan Trachtenberg

Hudson Hills Press, 2010

In a series of oils and watercolors, full of wit and wisdom and rich with historical allusion, John Ransom Phillips portrays the complexity of photographer Mathew Brady. Phillips explores the career of the artist who wanted to make history: an ambitious half-blind man with bluetinted glasses, straw hat, and duster who catapulted his subjects into celebrity and is best known today for his epic photos of the Civil War. Paradoxically, Brady sent assistants to photograph his most famous scenes—the battlefields at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Antietam—instructing them to re-arrange and photograph the dead in order to create images that would enhance public notions about death and dying.Walt Whitman emerges in the work as an antidote to Brady. The wound-dresser and poet represents the depths of man’s compassion and reminds us all that the full story of the Civil War can never be told. In his book-length essay, “Mathew Brady Ransomed,” historian Alan Trachtenberg helps to shape both the continuity and content of the study. Composed in an original mode of history painting, Phillips’s oil paintings and watercolors are themselves an extraordinary drama: at once comic, lyric, and tragic. They rediscover a photographer with imperfect vision, a historian who would not or could not gaze on the unburied dead of his greatest subject: Mathew Brady, American enigma.
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Ransoming Mathew Brady:
John Ransom Phillips with Alan Trachtenberg
HARDCOVER
9x12 in. (23 x 31 cm.)
328 pages / 309 color plates
ISBN: 978-1-55595-315-7

Ransoming Mathew Brady
There has perhaps never been anything quite like Ransoming Mathew Brady in the genre of history painting. It covers the antebellum and war years by uncovering patterns, issues, textures, and timbres of the times, not in naturalistic detail but realistically nevertheless. While the work alludes to or avails itself of stylistic elements from the history of painting, especially twentieth-century painting, it does so without abandoning anything of itself: its own integrity, its own realism, what is true to the artist’s personal insight, knowledge, and feeling.
—Alan Trachtenberg